Sloganeering

Until recently, Mitt Romney didn’t really have a campaign slogan—at least, not one that most voters knew. His best effort was “Believe in America,” a faintly passive-aggressive commandment (with its implicit indictment of all the unbelievers) that sounded like the name of some shadowy Super PAC. Then, last month, during a speech in front of an old firehouse in Roanoke, Virginia, President Obama was kind enough to supply Romney with more effective material.

Obama told the crowd about the importance of infrastructure and manufacturing, and he promised to help the middle class while reducing the deficit. He also indulged in some mockery of “wealthy, successful Americans” who overestimate their own abilities. “I’m always struck by people who think, Well, it must be because I was just so smart,” he said, smiling. “There are a lot of smart people out there.” Entrepreneurial success was a team effort, he argued:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, that—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Within days, the Romney campaign had set about turning “you didn’t build that” into a four-word indictment of Obama’s economic policy. In Irwin, Pennsylvania, Romney extolled the great men behind America’s greatest companies—Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Papa John—and took vigorous exception to the idea that business owners aren’t the authors of their own success. “It’s insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America, and it’s wrong,” he said. Perhaps Romney was misinterpreting Obama—some liberals argued, in vain, that the crucial “that” referred not to the business itself but to the “unbelievable American system.” Still, “you didn’t build that” resonated, especially among voters who were convinced that Obama is hostile to free enterprise. The Romney campaign shop now sells “We Built America” buttons, “Built by Us” posters, and T-shirts that say, “Government Didn’t Build My Business, I Did.” The passive-aggressive message has been superseded by an aggressive-aggressive one.

In this battle of platitudes, there is no real disagreement. Even while criticizing Obama’s bureaucratic arrogance, Romney conceded that successful businesses don’t exist in isolation. “We value schoolteachers, firefighters, people who build roads—you really couldn’t have a business if you didn’t have those things,” he said. Likewise, Obama hastened to explain that he hadn’t meant to call entrepreneurs undeserving of their success. In a follow-up video, he said, “Of course Americans build their own businesses”—pronouncing “Of course” in that slightly plaintive tone that politicians use when stating the obvious, as penance for having previously misstated it.

Beneath this airy philosophizing, the candidates are having a smaller, more sincere debate over taxes. Obama, seeking to repeal George W. Bush’s tax cuts for top earners, thinks that the rate should revert to 39.6 per cent; Romney, seeking to keep them, thinks that it should be thirty-five per cent or lower. This is not a new theme for Obama: when he campaigned for the Senate, eight years ago, he was already running against the Bush tax cuts. In “The Audacity of Hope,” he wrote, “I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d received from George Bush should be reversed.” Obama proved this again last week, during a fund-raising dinner at the NoMad Hotel, in Manhattan. He promised “tough spending cuts,” but he also acknowledged that his budget called for higher taxes on the rich—“about $1.5 trillion worth of increased revenue, primarily from folks in this room and those like us.”

The main difference between now and eight years ago is that final word, “us,” which has less to do with Obama’s changed financial circumstances than with his changed political circumstances. Where once he described his “well-heeled supporters” as if they were an alien species, now he reminds everyone that, by most voters’ standards, he is well-heeled, too. This is part of Obama’s attempt to deflect the charge that he is anti-wealth, and therefore anti-business; it’s also a handy way to suggest that Romney’s wealth, and by implication his business acumen, isn’t so special. “People like me and Mr. Romney don’t need another tax cut,” Obama likes to say. His calculation is that voters would rather hear this message from someone who seems rich than from someone who seems anti-rich. For a Democratic President charged with economic ineptitude, personal wealth might be a source of credibility.

Romney, who has much more money than Obama, is much less interested in discussing it. As Kevin McCarthy, the House Majority Whip, recently put it, “Romney has achieved some remarkable things in his life, but Romney’s probably the last person to talk to about them.” To promote the “Built by Us” message, the campaign released a series of videos starring small-business owners—“job creators,” we’re reminded—who are appalled at the idea of some bureaucrat (especially the Bureaucrat-in-Chief) taking credit for their hard work. An entrepreneur from Nevada looks into the camera, saying, “These hands built Kimmie Candy from four people to over twenty-four people—this is what makes America great.” It’s no coincidence that Romney’s campaign gravitates toward old-fashioned, labor-intensive, low-margin businesses, instead of highlighting, say, an innovative, streamlined, hugely profitable business, like the one Romney started. Eight years ago, pro-Bush ads managed to turn John Kerry’s service in Vietnam into a liability. In this year’s cruel twist, the success of Bain Capital has become a Democratic talking point, not a Republican one—a reminder that wealth creation need not be linked, in a straightforward way, to job creation.

Both candidates tend to wax nostalgic when they talk about the economy: while Romney enthuses about his visits to factories, lumber yards, and warehouses, Obama yearns for the era of grand railroads and dominant American car companies. They share a conviction that fixing the economy means returning to an older, better version of America, and that it’s partly a matter of reconnecting with whatever spirit once made us great. Romney views his task mainly in negative terms: if elected, he promises to prevent the federal government from stifling private enterprise, so that the innovators and the capitalists can go on innovating and capitalizing. Obama must make an even trickier argument. Having presided over a disappointing recovery, he must nonetheless convince voters that they should stay the course. The idea is that, despite some contrary indicators, America’s revival has already begun. Now all that voters have to do, as a not-so-small businessman once said, is believe. ♦